Originally Posted by
Easy Street
It all comes down to industrial strategy, which some see as verging on communism but proves its worth when you suddenly need to design and quickly ramp up production of something critical to national security, perhaps a vaccine for an emerging disease or perhaps a combat aircraft. Vaccine designers get to practice on the flu every year, and aircraft designers get to do weapons integration and occasional upgrade work, but the opportunity to work from a clean sheet comes around perhaps once in a career. The decision facing national security policy makers (ie broader than just Defence departments) is whether to keep the associated skills and experience alive: paying designers' salaries is precisely the point.
I do understand your general point. But why would you put them on a project that should deliver a 'bog standard' design, where copying of existing solutions would be the most viable approach.(If I were handed that task I would simply take the F- 16 design, at most add a few Cubic feet for a bit more fuel and electronic gadgets, maybe a few square inch more wing or even just clean up a few things that were learned during the last 40 years and be done with it) when at the same time designers are working on NGAD and stuff like that?